Divinely Ordained

Eric Foner

History never repeats itself, but there are uncanny resemblances between policies of the Bush Administration since 11 September and the way the Government under Abraham Lincoln responded to the crisis of the Civil War in the 1860s. Both Presidents assumed powers that went well beyond what the Constitution seems to allow. In both cases, thousands of people suspected of assisting the enemy were arrested and held without charge, and military tribunals were established to circumvent civilian courts. Both Lincoln and Bush met frequently with evangelical ministers, trying to ensure their active support for government policies. Leading members of both Administrations described the military conflict as an epic struggle between good and evil, inspired by the country’s divinely ordained mission to spread freedom and democracy throughout the world. The Bush Administration’s cavalier disregard for civil liberties has directed attention to the permissible limits on the rule of law in wartime. The same issue has become central to recent accounts of the Presidency of Abraham Lincoln.

Every generation reinvents Lincoln in its own image. He has been variously described as a consummate moralist and a shrewd political operator, a lifelong enemy of slavery and an inveterate racist. The most recent full-scale biography, by David Donald, published in 1995, offered a Lincoln buffeted by forces outside his control, a man of few deep convictions who failed to lead public opinion – rather like Bill Clinton. Although conceived before 11 September, both Richard Carwardine and Daniel Farber’s books have at least one eye on the present.

Carwardine focuses on Lincoln’s relationship to different kinds of power – political, military and moral, and the power of public opinion and religious enthusiasm in an overwhelmingly Protestant democracy. (Although feminists have demonstrated that power is an issue in intimate settings too, this is very much a study of Lincoln as a public figure.) Carwardine’s organising theme appears to have been dictated by the title of the series, Profiles in Power, in which the book appears. But it works extremely well. The book offers an insightful, judicious and in some ways original study of Lincoln’s public career.

Where Carwardine breaks new ground is in his treatment of Lincoln’s complicated relationship to evangelical Protestantism. Lincoln came of age during the Second Great Awakening, a prolonged series of religious revivals that reinvigorated and democratised American Christianity, but seems to have been unaffected by these revivals. As a youth, he had a reputation as an ‘infidel’, who read Paine’s Age of Reason and never became a member of a church. But he studied the Bible carefully, and biblical language and cadences suffused his rhetoric.

What little Carwardine says about Lincoln’s religious beliefs is, unavoidably, speculative, but he effectively demonstrates that Lincoln appreciated evangelicism’s political significance. During the 1850s, he worked to mobilise the political activism of those Protestant believers who saw the Republican Party, with its anti-slavery positions and thinly veiled hostility to Catholic immigrants, as the ‘Christian party’ in politics. As President, he frequently met with ministers at the White House and harnessed their vision of the war as a divinely inspired battle between national sin and national redemption. Carwardine shows how brilliantly Lincoln fused appeals to Protestant millennialism and Enlightenment rationalism, to the Bible and the Declaration of Independence, in the Union cause. During the war, he learned to use ‘cadres of mainstream Protestants’ as his ‘ideological shock troops’, and his success in creating powerful public sentiment in support of the war effort contrasted dramatically with the failure of his Confederate counterpart, Jefferson Davis, to mobilise Southern public opinion effectively.

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Letters

In comparing the attitudes of Abraham Lincoln to civil liberties during wartime with those of the Bush Administration, Eric Foner overlooks the fact that the United States is not currently at war in the sense that it was during the 1860s (LRB, 23 October). Lincoln led a US that was fighting for its own survival. In contrast, current Islamist terrorism does not itself represent a serious threat to the US polity; there is no prospect of an Islamist regime in Washington. The current threat to the Constitutional order of the US comes from the Administration’s own actions.

Overseas adventures such as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq do not usually, and need not, lead to widespread suspension of civil liberties at home. By declaring an open-ended ‘war on terror’, Bush pulled off the semantic trick of making it possible to justify permanent repressive administrative measures and legislation by disguising these as the requirements of a ‘wartime’ emergency. At the same time he endorsed the perpetrators’ own crazy perceptions that they were leading a religious ‘war’. There is no reason for the rest of us to accept either al-Qaida’s or the US Administration’s self-serving and inflammatory misdefinitions of what is going on.

By the standards of other countries in the mid-19th century, Lincoln’s regime appears to have been quite liberal, despite the serious threat that it faced. In contrast, the Bush Administration is a striking example of how repressive policies can be justified by exaggerating threats. Many other regimes, facing violent insurgencies, more dangerous to them than al-Qaida is to the US, are encouraged to persist with their human rights violations when they see the US casually erasing the values that it so frequently trumpets.

Thomas Smith
Basle

What should matter most is that Lincoln, born among racist Jacksonian Democrats on the Kentucky frontier, nonetheless became an opponent of slavery; that he was elected President on an anti-slavery platform which inspired the secession of seven Southern states; that he refused to compromise with those states or the four states that subsequently joined them; that he waged implacable war on what was then called the Slave Power; that he issued the Emancipation Proclamation and refused to retreat from it even when it appeared the war might be lost and he would not be re-elected in 1864; that he enlisted black soldiers, pushed through Congress the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery in 1865, and towards the end of his life was moving towards supporting black suffrage.